The Child in the Store of Colors

All the babies are born into this world without color. They have to go into a store when they are three and pick a color of their own. The little boy is led by his mother into the store, his little limb in his mother’s big warm hand. There’s an old craftsman in the store. He is wearing a barret, squinting at his work through a pair of small eyeglasses, carefully melting up every child and infusing colors into them. “Look!” the mother says to the boy tenderly, pressing close to his ears and pointing at the shelves, “So many colors!”

The boy looks up and sees all the colors on the colossal shelves that besiege him. They are endless. The colors dance on the shelves, glimmering, wavering, gurgling and swallowing one another to outshine their glamour. Candy apple red, dark magenta, blue, yellow, chocolate brown, sapphire, emerald, indigo. The boy marvels at them with his eyes wide open and his heart full of joy.

“You can pick any color you want! The most beautiful color! And it will be YOUR color!” says the mother.

The boy is silent.

All these colors. All the colors in the world. The color of quiet lonely lakes at sunset, the color of the eyes of the cats, the color of stars in the night sky, the color of the fire in primeval forests. The boy looks on with his head held high. His neck begins to ache.

When the mother asks whether he has found his color, the boy shakes his head. His ears turn red. The mother begins to show her concern. “But everyone has a color! If you do not have a color of your own, you’ll become transparent! You’ll become invisible! You’ll become non-existent!” The little boy does not speak. The craftsman peers at him through his small eye-glasses. The boy walks out of the store, untinted.

And this is the story of how a boy grows up to be the man who has all the colors in the world.